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Journal of Physics Conference Series

Spectral properties of entanglement witnesses and separable states

Gniewomir Sarbicki

Published Mar 1, 2008• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Entanglement witnesses are observables which when measured, detect entanglement in a composed system. It is shown what kind of relations among eigenvectors an observable should fulfill to be an entanglement witness. A similar analysis shows some relations among eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a density operator, which are necessary for the operator to be separable.

DOI
10.1088/1742-6596/104/1/012009

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Entanglement witnesses are observables which when measured, detect entanglement in a composed system. It is shown what kind of relations among eigenvectors an observable should fulfill to be an entanglement witness. A similar analysis shows some relations among eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a density operator, which are necessary for the operator to be separable.
Entanglement witnesses are observables which when measured, detect entanglement in a measured composed system. It is shown what kind of relations between eigenvectors of an observable should be fulfilled, to allow an observable to be an entanglement witness. Some restrictions on the signature of entaglement witnesses, based on an algebraic-geometrical theorem will be given. The set of entanglement witnesses is linearly isomorphic to the set of maps between matrix algebras which are positive, but not completely positive. A translation of the results to the language of positive maps is also given. The properties of entanglement witnesses and positive maps express as special cases of general theorems for kkk-Schmidt witnesses and kkk-positive maps. The results are therefore presented in a general framework.
We present a systematic investigation of the spectral properties of entanglement witnesses (EWs). Specifically, we analyze the infimum and supremum of the largest eigenvalue, the smallest eigenvalue, the negativity (defined as the absolute value of the sum of negative eigenvalues), and the squared Frobenius norm of a unit-trace (normalized) entanglement witness, along with the conditions under which these values are attained. Our study provides distinct characterizations for decomposable (DEWs) and nondecomposable entanglement witnesses (NDEWs). While these two classes share many spectral similarities, we reveal a fundamental divergence by proving that the infimum of the smallest eigenvalue can be attained by DEWs, yet remains strictly unattainable for all NDEWs. We apply the results to provide necessary conditions for an EW to possess a mirrored EW. Furthermore, we demonstrate the superior detection capability of NDEWs by proving that any non-positive-partial-transpose state beyond the two-qubit and qubit-qutrit systems can be detected by an NDEW.
This thesis deals with methods of the detection of entanglement.After recalling some facts and definitions concerning entanglement and separability, we investigate two methods of the detection of entanglement.In the first part of this thesis we consider so-called entanglement witnesses, mainly in view of the detection of multipartite entanglement.Entanglement witnesses are observables for which a negative expectation value indicates entanglement.We first present a simple method to construct these witnesses.Since witnesses are nonlocal observables, they are not easy to measure in a real experiment.However, as we will show, one can circumvent this problem by decomposing the witness into several local observables which can be measured separately.We calculate the local decompositions for several interesting witnesses for two, three and four qubits.Local decompositions can be optimized in the number of measurement settings which are needed for an experimental implementation.We present a method to prove that a given local decomposition is optimal and discuss with this the optimality of our decompositions.Then we present another method of designing witnesses which are by construction measurable with local measurements.Finally, we shortly report on experiments where some of the witnesses derived in this part have been used to detect three-and four-partite entanglement of polarized photons.The second part of this thesis deals with separability criteria which are written in terms of uncertainty relations.There are two different formulations of uncertainty relations since one can measure the uncertainty of an observable by its variance as well as by entropic quantities.We show that both formulations are useful tools for the derivation of separability criteria for finite-dimensional systems and investigate the resulting criteria.Our results in this part exhibit also some more fundamental properties of entanglement: We show how known separability criteria for infinitedimensional systems can be translated to finite-dimensional systems.Furthermore, we prove that any entropic uncertainty relation on one part of the system gives rise to a separability criterion on the composite system.
Tensor eigenvalues and eigenvectors have been introduced in the recent mathematical literature as a generalization of the usual matrix eigenvalues and eigenvectors. We apply this formalism to a tensor that describes a multipartite symmetric state or a spin state, and we investigate to what extent the corresponding tensor eigenvalues contain information about the multipartite entanglement (or, equivalently, the quantumness) of the state. This extends previous results connecting entanglement to spectral properties related to the state. We show that if the smallest tensor eigenvalue is negative, the state is detected as entangled. While for spin-1 states the positivity of the smallest tensor eigenvalue is equivalent to separability, we show that for higher values of the angular momentum there is a correlation between entanglement and the value of the smallest tensor eigenvalue.
With an aim to detect the genuine entanglement of a mixed state at the nearby pure state, we reflect a practicable approach concerning the construction of witness and express expectations to detect separable, bipartite states, and multiqubit entangled states. We introduce the related concept of the density matrix, multiqubit state, entangled state entanglement witness, etc. In addition, we give unambiguous definitions of separable states, entangled states, and genuinely entangled states. Therefore, we are able to detect the genuine entanglement of a mixed state at the nearby pure state employing the witness that is constructed for the multiqubit states.
An entangled state of a two-particle system is a quantum state that cannot be separated-it cannot be written as the product of states of the individual particles.One way to tell if a system is entangled is to use it to violate a Bell inequality (such as the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt, CHSH, inequality), because entanglement is necessary to violate these inequalities.However, there are other, more efficient measurements that determine whether or not a system is entangled; an operator that corresponds to such a measurement is referred to as an entanglement witness.We present the theory of witness operators, and an undergraduate experiment that measures an entanglement witness for the joint polarization state of two photons.We are able to produce states for which the expectation value of the witness operator is entangled by more than 160 standard deviations.